RIPENING SEASONS

Issue #16, August 1996

It was on a Friday the
13th...

A time for reflection. Last week, on
August 13, I quietly observed a significant anniversary in my life:
twenty-five years from the day of its regeneration. It was on that
date that I walked off a job, and out of a life, in 1971

It would be more true to say I walked into a life, for the one I
left behind was more of a torment, if I can pass that off as a noun.
It was the American Dream gone wrong, the encagement of a soul that
had just about forgotten how to fly. I won't dwell on the things that
were squeezing the life out of me, but just say that they
constituted, or grew out of, the standard, applied conception of that
time, of what a life should be like: a marriage, a career, a home and
family, and the securities and perks of being just like everyone
else. A good deal more rigidly so, than in today's world.

Oh, I wasn't really very much like everyone else, but it was
mainly because I couldn't seem to manage it, not because I rejected
it. Not until that day in 1971, at any rate. I had a very late start
(for those days) on both marriage and career, never did get a home
"of my own," and fathered no children. But I was playing the game,
and I measured my life by how short of the mark it always fell.

I couldn't even stay on the track of it. The entire decade of my
thirties was one aborted revolt after another: a bobbled effort to
complete my education, several feckless failures at small enterprise
(too insignificant to be called small business), and repeated halfway
tries to recast my life in a bachelor mode. I was like the guy with
his arm tangled in his suicide noose - he couldn't even manage to
hang himself successfully.

Through all those years, I could not figure out whether the
problem was me (some perversion of my own nature), or just my
inability to make the grade. It never really occurred to me that the
whole damned Dream, and the idea that everyone should find a fit for
themselves, in it, was the cause of all my agony. I think that was
largely because no other routing for a useful or satisfying life was
visible. If you wanted to be an artist, you still had to join the
marketing stream to earn the money to pay the rent; if you wanted to
vagabond the seven seas in a sloop of your own, you still had to be
able to afford the sloop and its provisioning. Nobody but the Aussie
Aborigines lived outside the loop, and look at the sort of lives they
had to settle for.

But then, in the late `60s, along came an incredible generation
that said, "Hell no, we won't go!" They had the actual effrontery and
imagination to try and redefine life! And this old guy (by
their measure), all the way into his mid-40s, suddenly saw a patch of
blue sky.

Thus it was, by grasping and clinging to the tail of an errant and
rebellious host, already (by 1971) losing its sense of direction,
that I piggy-backed my way out of the mainstream dream. There are
times in life when it is of utmost importance to trust your instincts
and leap for the unknown. Or as Danaan Parry used to say, you've got
to sense the moment and let go of your trapeze, in order to catch the
one swinging toward you.

That moment was twenty-five years ago last week. And I mean to
devote this issue to a memoir, in roughly five-year segments, of the
successive new vistas and remarkable discoveries that I have
encountered, over that period of time. My purpose, besides this being
a moment of celebration, is to demonstrate how little we may know of
life's potential - not just our own potential, for this is common
grist, but life's potential, in the sense of an extended
concept of reality itself - when we merely accept the world as
a given.

For it was a `given,' to me, that I was leaping headlong into a
rough and risky sea - choosing adventure and selfhood over
stagnation, to be sure, but at the very probable cost of any possible
long-term security, and in the sure promise that I should
thenceforth, always, be living by my wits. I even hedged my risk, at
the time, by persuading myself that I could, for a few years at
least, go scuttling back, with tail between my legs, if it proved an
impossibly terrifying venture.

There are many, today, who contemplate abandoning the "Dream
world," looking to the host of their own growing numbers for
psychological support - but relying more substantively on some large
hedge of investments to keep the anxiety of uncertainty at a low
simmer. While I hail their courage - for any avenue that will see
them into lives of inner-motivated choice is not to be lightly
regarded - I must, at the same time, say that their backstop
investment is likely to cheat them of the richest realm of discovery,
and I shall try to show why this may be so, in this summary of my
quarter-century. The simplest statement of it, of course, is that
wonderful old Kristofferson song title, "Freedom's just another name
for nothing left to lose" - but we are talking, ultimately, of far
more than freedom.

The Black Bart Years

One of the more puzzling truisms of
quantum physics is that a seemingly remote action can generate a
direct consequence somewhere else in the Universe, maybe lightyears
away. In a way, that's exactly what happened when I dropped out. On
that very day, a letter was posted to me from a young people's
collective in a place called Canyon - a letter in response to one of
my own, sent many months previous and long-since forgotten. The
Universe had somehow been waiting all those months for my move . . .
or else, preparing me for it. From this beginning, I was sponsored by
that collective to put out a pilot issue of Black Bart
Brigade, to see what response it would reap.

That narrowly gained start, my first compass setting for this new
journey, was immensely fortuitous, for Black Bart would turn
out to be far more than an occupation in my alternative world. It
became my teacher, alter-ego, and sole claim to significance, for
more than a decade. It allowed me to help others, and established for
me a widespread network of friends, a support system in every sense,
some of whom are still a part of my life.

In ordinary occupational terms - that is, as a source of steady
income - it was almost a joke. It had the marvelous knack of
providing barely enough for my subsistence, constantly pushing me to
ever more stringent levels of makeshift survival. But it was such a
lovely partner, providing every satisfaction, every validation, every
personal connection that I needed over those years, that I never once
considered abandoning it. Quite the contrary, every time it fell by
the wayside, for lack of funds or other vicissitude, I pulled it back
by the bootstraps, reconstituting it in some new variant of name, or
format, or dedication.

All told, there were only 15 issues and some eight or ten interim
newsletters or supplements, over a span of about thirteen years. Not
much of a production record; but something in their style and
content, perhaps in their very manner of phoenix-like rebirth, held
the readership at a fairly constant 300 to 400. Sufficient to provide
me with a time of radical schooling in a whole other way of life,
than the mode under which I had grown up. Let me dwell a bit on what
that was all about.

At the first level of instruction, it
taught me how to pursue a right livelihood, which is
distinctly different than "making a living." What I was doing became
more important than what I earned from it, and thus I could shape it
not as a "business," but as a meaningful pursuit, shorn of all the
commercial crap that had turned my stomach for half a lifetime:
advertising and promotion, sales and hype, forms and permits,
bookkeeping and tax filings . . . I styled its process exactly to my
liking, and gave my readers 100% "pure gold" - or as close to it as
my talents and funds would allow. It wasn't always strictly legal
(like my utter disdain for copyright law), but it was
honorable every step of the way, in the Don Juan sense of a
path with heart. Almost from the start, I sent it out for what each
reader felt it was worth. The word "donation" had not yet lost its
old-fashioned meaning, in those days.

Secondly, it stepped me down gently into the ways of
simple-living, bringing people-based support systems into my life,
introducing me to networking, barter and the many ways we can help
one another without putting a price on it. These are so much richer
and more human ways of getting one's needs met, than the alienating
artifice of money-based systems. And more secure, too: by the time my
backstop bank account had dropped to zero, I was nested in an
alternative world of such security that I handled the anxiety factor
with perfect equanimity. But that came a bit later, during the second
five-year span.

The third great initiation of those Black Bart years was my
introduction to the "Eastern side of the mountain," as I called it.
The surprise and fascination of it all seems now quite strange, but I
had lived for half a lifetime with not the least awareness of that
entire side of life. Suddenly, a range of names from Lao Tzu to
Krishnamurti, and mystic studies from astrology to the Tarot and I
Ching - rich and profound, but areas I had always before either
laughed at or ignored - began to deepen my understanding of things. I
cautiously began to bring them into my writing - into the essentially
political orientation of Black Bart social analysis - not even
realizing that most of my readers were well ahead of me. I was the
new kid on that block, not they.

Those were crazy and exciting years, exuberant in a freedom I had
not known since college days. All in the simple abandonment of the
yoke and harness that we so eagerly take on as the mantle of
adulthood. Oh, yes, there were problems and struggles, too - a
communal effort that failed, a love affair that went awry, and the
ever-present uncertainty of where this would all end . . . but living
in the framework of an open-ended freedom, whether I had the
sufficient means for it or not, was a `high' that is simply
unimaginable without the experience of it.

The greatest challenge may have been
the barbs of criticism - often reflecting my own inner doubt, but
hurled by those in envy and outright awe of such heresy: "Hey, being
rather irresponsible, aren't you?" ... "No matter how you cut it,
fella, you're expecting others to take care of you" ... or the simple
raised eyebrow that bespeaks a torrent of judgement. In one form or
another, the self-righteous have their say and take their toll,
demanding that some effective rationale be worked out, at least to
subdue one's own inner ambivalence.

Mine lay, first of all, in a straight-out challenge to the various
definitions and moralisms that stand like indestructible foundations
beneath our intolerance of others. What really means those
self-elevating judgements by which we salve the daily pain of modern
life: maturity, responsibility, respectability, and such? It is not
too difficult to deconstruct those noble terms of a necessary
consolation and self-esteem, when they are used as brickbats.

But the deeper rationale was found in a recognition of the entire
artifice of the world that has conditioned us, and a return to the
source so ably expressed in that Book that people pretext to live by:
"Consider ye the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither
toil nor spin..." I took the admonition all the way, and found
my peace in the sure conviction that no person provides my
sustenance, but only functions as an avenue of the Universal
Providence . . . so long as I do not demand or expect of anyone that
function. (It is fair game to ask assistance, however, for this is
the means by which we maintain our humility, and give an opportunity
for sharing to others.)

Well, there you have the perfect legitimation of the panhandler,
so let us move on to . . .

The Yin Times & Colostomy
Years

In 1975, well before my Black Bart years had
even counted to five, the worst possible scenario erupted in my life.
I was hard at work on a book, actually requested by a publisher, when
I fell into the black hole of a severe bout with colitis, my personal
nemesis for many years . . . and then, my large bowel suddenly
ruptured. By extreme good fortune, I was already in the hospital -
else I would not be here to write these words - and I underwent
radical surgery less than eight hours later. My very being in the
hospital at that time was due to an amazing confluence of
synchronicities that should have left no doubt at all about the place
of Providence in the evolvement of personal affairs - but I was in no
condition to see it, at that moment.

It left me with an ugly and desperately unwanted colostomy - I
actually tried to remain in the hospital until they could reverse the
whole thing, so unwilling was I to cope with it. But if ever a
disaster proved a blessing, this was it.

In the course of that summer, it
brought me to the point of finally letting-go, entirely, of all that
remained of my birthright, bottom-line insistence that I could take
care of myself. The debacle so completely shattered my claim to
personal power, that it became the real turning-point of my life, as
opposed to the event that this month's anniversary observes. Of
course, I needed those Black Bart years of preparation, in order to
reach the new level of development.

Simply put, I found myself at the end of my resources. The
book-in-process had vanished in the black hole, the publisher no
longer interested. I had, perhaps, $100 in the bank, but no place to
live, and no Black Bart to lean on for a last-minute rescue. I
had announced to one and all, in a newsletter three months previous
to the bowel calamity, that the first cycle of Black Bart was
over. In a marvelously precognitive note, I added that "...I must
step off toward new horizons which are beyond the possibilities of
Black Bart as it has defined itself." But how could I possibly
know that I was "stepping off" into a chasm?

Sparing you (and myself) the messy, bewildering details, I reached
a point of actually, consciously, putting myself into the hands of
the gods - acknowledging that I could not handle it on my own.
And for any religious freaks out there, this submissive act had
nothing at all to do with Jesus, whom I do not regard as God, the Son
of, or any other such splendiferous thing (and I doubt that he ever
claimed it for himself). I was putting myself in the hands of a
Pantheistic Universe, or Spirit, or whatever.

Whether amazing things began to happen, then, or whether I simply
began to see what was going on (all the time, perhaps?) with
different eyes, I do not know. But the summer became a spectacular
display of Providence. So I had my second compass setting - just
watching it all unfold, and following where circumstance and inner
prompting might lead.

In the earlier Black Bart years, I seemed to be living by my wits,
leaping the ice floes of a happenstance world, always alert to such
beneficence as I could grasp and claim for my own. In this new space,
I learned how to blend with the current, to read the signals (stop,
go, and turn here), and just let it happen. I no longer saw myself as
a chancey, lucky, somewhat foolhardy survivor, but as something of an
innocent, a `newborn child' just riding the crest of whatever was
happening. I suspect, though, that the only difference was in my own
head.

The money-line, as earlier noted, went down to zero, and I became
fascinated just watching what happened from there on. Nobody will
believe it - it seems unreal, even to me, from my present "wealthy"
standpoint - but for more than a year, I watched my funds just bubble
easily around the zero mark. I'd have a few bucks left in my pocket,
and then a five or ten would come in from somewhere: a random
donation, an old debt repaid, money literally found, or earned in
some occasional way - I even panhandled a bit, not strictly for
myself, but for the Free Clinic of Berkeley, who shared their takings
with the takers - but it was always there, in one way or another, and
seldom from any direct initiative of mine.

And then in 1977 another series of fortuitous developments took me
to Carmel, that stunningly lovely seacoast village where only
tourists and wealthy retirees can afford their keep. A charming old
soul took me on as part-time attendant, for (what amounted to) the
last year of her life. I recall the difficult spot it put me in:
having to `bargain' for appropriate wages and rent, after living the
innocent life portrayed above. Finally, knowing where my head was at,
I said I didn't want any wages at all, I would do it as a
straight trade for the privilege of residence there.

I had, by this time, begun the short-lived successor to the
original Black Bart, which I called The Yin Times of Black
Bart, so I had no reason to want or rely on any outside wages.
But if the old Black Bart was laid-back, this new version was
twice as much so - there were only two issues of it (included in the
earlier tally).

Meanwhile, the final teaching from my colostomy had been absorbed.
A year after it was installed, I went in for surgery again, to see if
there had been enough healing for its removal. No such luck, and my
spirits were so dashed as a result, that I realized I had never
really come to terms with it. It was quite clear, then, that only by
fully accepting the colostomy could I ever rise above it, and
that's just what I set out to do - so effectively, that I was
entirely surprised when word of its possible removal was once more
broached by my doctor. And this time, after three years of living
with it, the colostomy was successfully terminated.

In the final phase of these Yin years, I went to live in the woods
at a mountain camp called Kilowana, where we had done workshops back
in the glory years of Black Bart. It was a final healing time
for me, and a place to complete that adventurous and growth-filled
decade. Even to wistfully regret its passing, for I was quite sure
that the rest of my life would be lived in such semi-solitary
retreat.

The Hillegass Transitional Years

I don't know how similar it is for
others, but Providence has always been able to set my compass course
by putting a woman somewhere near the helm. Toward the end of 1981,
friends from far and wide gathered at Kilowana to celebrate with me
the tenth anniversary of Black Bart - among them, a psychic
couple who predicted that I would soon go forth again in the outside
world (which I doubted), and an old friend just back from a long
sojourn in India, seeking some California place to settle. On her
account, I went to mediate with friends at the Hillegass collective
in Berkeley, and found myself utterly entranced by a
soon-to-be-available garden cottage made over as a living space: a 7'
by 11' challenge and charm that my meager resources could handle. I
just loved the way it felt.

By mid-1982 I was there, beginning a three-year period of
regeneration in the `outer world.' There was a certain ripeness to my
life, now. Black Bart had once more transmogrified at
Kilowana: a mimeographed vehicle for all sorts of social and New Age
commentary, done with flair and style that defied the limitations of
the medium. But it no longer had the fire or spirit of old . . . I
was doing it simply because I could not part with it. In 1984, I
finally laid it - finally - to rest.

Those years in Berkeley were essentially transitional. While it
was great to be once more among folks I could easily relate to - not
just in Hillegass House, but the entire surrounding neighborhood, as
well - all of their lives (and my own, by now, too) had come to seem
rather drearily middle-class. Colored, to be sure, by alternative
leanings (could one really call a communal group middle-class?), but
it was hard to ignore a certain rancid fragrance of domestic
contentment that seemed to permeate everything, sending it off-color
from the brilliant freshness it had once displayed. Like a once
lovely garden gone to seed.

But it was comfortable, and I found it all too easy to linger. And
it was surely my best communal living experience, among several tries
over the years. My life, however, had no stimulating purpose. So when
the opportunity came to spend a few months at that notorious place in
Oregon called Rajneeshpuram, I took it as a worthwhile diversion,
knotting another interesting and illuminating experience on my
growing string of them. It contributed to my next major compass
setting - not toward the Bhagwan, but an interesting woman whom I met
while there.

The compass now pointed northwest, but other developments would
provide the actual motive power for the long and devious journey that
finally landed me in Seattle. The proximate prod was diminishing
resources: I was running out of rent money, and there was no more
Black Bart to lead the charge for a last minute rescue. In
middle-class lives, one goes out to find a job, but I felt somehow
beyond all that. I had successfully evaded it for almost fifteen
years, and was loathe to try the fit of leg-irons, clinking shut once
more around my ankles.

So I convened a giant farewell party - a house-cooling, I called
it - and set out on the last great indigent adventure, a footloose
journey to see how Providence would deal with me, and how I would
deal with the situation of being virtually broke and homeless in the
wide world of America. It was a test of faith I had long thought
about, and likely my last opportunity to try it, for I was only four
years away from Social Security entitlement.

The College Years

The name for that summer's journey came to me out of nowhere, and
stuck better than duct tape: my Summer of Infinite Presence. It seems
absurd to say that I spent six months going around the country, at a
cost of nothing at all, but an April note in my pre-departure journal
says I set out with $150, and an October entry in the Seattle area
annotates $175 in resources. My needs, of course, were covered by
friendship and donations, but at a deeper level it was Providence,
making sure that nowhere in the country would I ever lack for shelter
or food.

I hadn't really intended to spend the following winter in Seattle,
just the time for a decent visit with the woman from Rajneeshpuram.
But events took over: the sudden retraction of a southern California
offer of seasonal residence, an unjust traffic citation that I felt I
had to stay and fight, and finally a two-week drenching of snow -
rare for Seattle - that killed any hope of escaping a northwest
winter.

It meant I had to find shelter somewhere, and it came in the form
of a live-in caretaking position with a bedridden multiple-sclerosis
victim. A blessing, to be sure, but also the difficult challenge of
being saddled with 24-hour responsibility, six days per week. She and
I agreed to a six-month `tour of duty,' and I bit the bullet - my
first hard-earned income in fourteen years.

When I left the Bay Area, I had really embarked on a whole new way
of living-in-the-world, which I call the Way of Innocence. It comes,
almost in a natural progression, after the realization of Providence
and the discovery that the capabilities of human will and reason are
virtually incompetent when measured against what the `will of
the gods' can bring about. In large part, of course, I had been
living like this ever since the colostomy; but when I set out in 1985
to do it deliberately, holding onto no security of any consequence, I
moved into the flow with such a totality that it must finally be
regarded as a different level of being. Almost from the moment of my
arrival in the northwest, the gods took hold - by which I mean, my
path seemed to lay itself out - and I had little further say in what
came about.

At the end of my six months of caretaking, I was prompted, by the
arrival of an 'invitation to bid' for a small grant, to find a quiet
rental nearby and undertake, once again, the writing of a book. The
grant never materialized, and the book-start was rejected - once
again - by a publisher. Their illusionary hold on me had simply
served to pass the time of summer, until my old friend back from
India came up with an offer to pool resources for a northwest winter
together. Moving again with the moment's currents, I found what
seemed the perfect spot on Whidbey Island. It was the perfect
spot, but not for our shared venture!

Unable to uphold my end of the winter costs, for lack of any
available employment, I instead found myself qualified, by the island
location, for a vocational rehab program that put me into school the
following spring, embarked on a year-long publications technology
program, including the basics of desktop publishing. More than that,
it tracked me onto larger educational funding possibilities, and
before long I was poised to resume a forty-year-delayed baccalaureate
education, at the Univ. of Washington. The whole business involved an
uncanny precision of stepping stones - even to the extent of repaying
a 27-year-old college loan default that stood in my way, from funds
newly received for current educational purposes.

By 1989, well on my way toward the college degree, and awash in
the largess of educational funding, I had bridged the gap to my
entitlement years and could no longer be indigent again. But I made a
fighting thrust at it, one more time, by taking off on a completely
insecure venture abroad, risking a London cost-of-living that my
homegrown resources could not possibly handle. You know all about
that story, the year and a half through Europe - as rare an adventure
as anyone of my age and fiscal level has ever had. And you know, now,
why I had to call the book of it Innocence Abroad.

[Note: For a more detailed presentation of those years since
leaving Berkeley, and how the schooling actually evolved, read the
newsletter: Derelict Days in
the Northwest

The Relationship Years

I almost called it the retirement years, for these last four since
my return from Europe have had a rare kind of completion quality. But
I don't like the retirement image, and don't really see myself in any
such twilight, though I write about it often enough.

They've been highly active years, actually: writing the book,
doing my own graphic arts for it, getting on the Internet with a new
computer, setting up a Web site, creating Ripening Seasons
(this issue of which marks a tally that now exceeds the total number
of Black Bart issues!) - a wide assortment of fresh starts,
for one's latter 60s. Any one of these could characterize my current
times, but there is one other that seems more the central theme of
it, a constant thread, almost since my return home.

My relationship with Joy, of course
- something I hadn't anticipated, or even much hoped for at this
presumably waning time of my life. You know all about the battle we
fought, this year - no, not with each other, but side-by-side (the
kind of relationship we have), in order to live "together" at a
fraction of what that would expectably cost. Now, we have the best of
all worlds, in our view, living separately but together, for we each
have solitary pursuits that are meaningful in our lives.

We're pretty well suited to each other, too. There is no question
about who does the driving, for neither of us has a car; there are no
hassles over money or what to spend it on, for we're both accustomed
to living on shallow budgets; and no ego struggles over whose work is
best (her art or my writing), for we're each out of the commercial
stream of it, not competing in any way. But most of all, we're both
upbeat and basically happy people, and there hasn't been more than
the barest wisp of a cloud between us since we first got to know each
other.

The sense of completion that I feel, in these latter years, might
reflect the way in which both Providence and Innocence have finally
blended, and are experienced in the course of my recent life. For
everything comes together, now, almost as if it were fore-ordained.
The country, as a whole, may be going through an angst-ridden
turbulence and upheaval, with nothing sure of the future, but I feel
so totally secure in my own world that my only problems revolve
around keeping up with all there is to entice my involvement. It
can't really get any better than this!

And there you have it: as vital and fabulous a quarter-century
slice of life, as anywhere you can find (and, hey, I only hit the
high spots!) - all because I chose, in a moment of desperate
inspiration, to chuck the American Dream and go find one of my own .
. . hazards be damned.

Looking back over this spectacle, I find it still incredible that
I've been unable to interest a publisher in any aspect of it, over
the years. I generally am inclined to think that there is some
learning to be had here, and I "ain't yet got it" - but it might just
be the elemental proof that commerce and an internally vital life
simply don't mix . . . and I made my choice, between the two, all
that many years ago.